Published

I have a slight issue with Todd Warfel’s post about ethnography. He writes as if ethnography and anthropology were the same thing, and they’re not. If you break the word ethnography down into its constituent parts … ethno (culture) graphy (writing) — writing about culture is a subtly different task to studying culture. And the methods of studying culture have moved on. Warfel’s definition: “I describe ethnography as a fancy term for shadowing” has exactly the negative connotations of the power relation of traditional anthropology (subject:observer/ object:observed) — that postmodern ethnography seeks to address.